“You go to Gilbert!” she said. “Your place is with your husband.”
“No!” cried Claudine, desperately. “I can’t!”
“You go!” said the old lady. “Quick! I’ll have none of this under my roof.”
And she went so far as to take her by the arm and hurry her out of the room. But there was no cause to be worried about any further scene; Gilbert had gone to sleep, fully dressed, on the bed.
§ iii
And the next morning he regarded it all as a great joke. He complained ruefully of a headache, but he was proud of it. He burst out laughing when his mother mentioned her damaged carpet, and to Claudine’s surprise, the old lady was wonderfully indulgent. He told Claudine not to mind, it wouldn’t happen again; but it did, more than once. Only on special occasions, though, as he pointed out to her; he was no drunkard. He was simply a good fellow; and he felt that she ought to appreciate his social qualities. He was sincerely aggrieved at her attitude, her scorn, her cold aversion. He told her she was straitlaced and puritanical; he thought she was shocked because he could not imagine that she was disgusted. She didn’t find him devilish; she found him repulsive. It was not a question of forgiveness; she felt for him a profound distaste and aversion which she never again overcame. It was not even that she had ceased to love him; she had simply discovered that she never had loved him. She was not by nature affectionate or indulgent; she was fastidious, always a little apart from life, never quite human. She was a dutiful egoist.
She looked back over these three months of married life with a sort of cold wonder. The long, long days, the tedious drives, the dull calls on dull people, the unpleasant meals, the stuffy dismalness of the house! She thought that the Vincelle friends were the most unspeakably tiresome people in the world. To go with her mother-in-law and sit in their augustly gloomy parlours for the required fifteen minutes, or to receive them in like fashion at home, to sit at their dinner tables, or to see them sitting at hers, was an infliction almost beyond her endurance. Except at dinners, she saw nothing but women; they had euchre-parties, receptions, luncheons, once in a while a matinée party. A harem world of pampered women, interested in nothing, women whose husbands were pleased to see them expensively dressed, wearing jewels, who required them to be ladylike; but didn’t expect them to be seductive. They were all good, all complacent, and they seemed to Claudine years and years older and more mature than herself. She made no friends. Vincelle heard that one of the young married women did china painting, and that aroused a spark of interest in her. She approached the alleged artist, young Mrs. Ryder.
“Oh, yes! I love it!” the artist told her. “Of course I don’t have much time; but I positively made up my mind not to drop it after I married. It’s such a mistake, don’t you think, to get into a rut? I believe a man thinks ever so much more of his wife if she has some interests of her own.”
Claudine’s heart sank; then it was, after all, nothing but another harem accomplishment, a trick to secure attention.
“Of course I don’t have much time,” the other went on. “There’s so much to do, isn’t there?”